As a power user, the only time I care about URL's is when copy-pasting and when developing web apps.
I like to explicitly know what I'm copy pasting.
It offends my personal sensibilities to make websites with ugly links.
Other than that ... I don't know. I can't decide how I feel about this, but I can't help but think that I really don't care about the URL being accessible. Not like I ever do anything with it.
And that has got to be the most irritating thing about Google these days, they mangle the URLs in their search results to the point where I can't get a clean URL sometimes, at least not without some real work.
This is one of the cases where a userscript or filter proxy is really useful.
There's some interesting cookie-looking values in those URL parameters too, not sure if there's anything privacy-critical in them but it's still a bit of a concern.
> the only time I care about URL's is when copy-pasting
This is like saying the only time I care about electricity is when I need to power something. The fact that there's a universal textual way to refer to and link everything – like via copy and paste – is precisely why the web is so powerful.
More like "the only time I care about electricity is when taking a battery from one device and putting it in another".
If there was a way to tell Chrome "Share this website on Skype to this person" or "Send this to this-or-that IRC channel" I would never care about the URL. The only reason I interact with it is because I want to share the page with someone specific (rather than using a spamming/sharing widget).
But I never manipulate the URL directly, or care about its specific parts.
Hell, if there was a keyboard shortcut for "put reference to current page on copypaste stack" I'd never click the URL at all.
I guess, but that seems far, far more ugly than the elegance of copy paste. Copy-paste doesn't require special implementation, or inter-app compatibility, or anything special or extra.
Why are moving away from powerful and flexible systems that allow us to consume and produce? Why is the trend so constantly towards sealed, black-box, consumption exclusive habits? It makes me so sad to see.
* Dev tools get better and better, giving you better insights into other peoples websites than ever before. One-click to make a minified JS file readable? Awesome!
* Web apps get more complex, giving you the ability to work & create on the web, Google docs let you literally stop mid-sentence, switch the device and keep writing your essay on the go
* Tumblr, wikipedia, twitter, - all relatively recent additions to the web and definitely not "consumption exclusive"
I'm not sure where your "consumption exclusive" comes from. I'd call it just "inclusive". The web tries to be for everyone, and that includes people who couldn't care less about a 20 character hex id when they want to write up their great concept for developing rural areas in Rumania. Sure, you will always have more consumers than producers on the grand scale of things. But I'm failing to see any reason to see recent trends as anything close to what you describe.
If there was a way to tell Chrome "Share this website on Skype to this person" or "Send this to this-or-that IRC channel" I would never care about the URL.
Yes, android's intent system is neat. But after years of experience with it, it's sadly not a pancea.
I always fix Amazon product page URLs before sending them to others. It's incredible how much useless stuff they put in those URLs. I don't want peoples' screens to fill up with a whole paragraph full of garbage.
Well that's nice, but some of us still have (e.g.) parents to help over the phone. Not to mention the address/URL/etc. field is an important part of computer literacy.
This change (just like the hiding the scheme part) affects everyone who copies links, which is something that almost everyone using the Internet has done at some point. It's just an extra click, but an unnecessary one.
From the article it sounds like Chrome is replacing the URL (which is difficult for humans to parse) with an "origin chip" that contains just the domain name. This improves on the use case you point out.
If we assume that most users do not know what a URL is then why can we assume that the information handed to them by an origin chip is any more useful to them?
Same reason as some browsers started to grey out parts of the hostname - if the only thing a user sees is "bankofamreica.com" or "bankofamerica.com.foroigs.io" they have a better chance of catching the thing that's wrong. Noise/information ratio etc..
I like to explicitly know what I'm copy pasting.
It offends my personal sensibilities to make websites with ugly links.
Other than that ... I don't know. I can't decide how I feel about this, but I can't help but think that I really don't care about the URL being accessible. Not like I ever do anything with it.